Category Archives: Social Implications

A Button Without The Treat

A few months ago I wrote a post entitled +1 is Explicit, but is not Relevance Feedback.  I am often personally concerned that, with many of the posts I write, I am being pedantic.  However, last week TechCrunch came to … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 4 Comments

Miffed and Confused

Have been on a six month blogging hiatus, and wouldn’t you know it.. it took another fun Google article to pull me back.  It is a recent FastCompany piece, entitled Google to Zuckerberg, Bing: We Still Innovate.  The premise of … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 5 Comments

Simplicity: Sparsity or Storytelling?

A tweet by @akumar prompted me to punch up this quick blogpost: as with all controversial issues, there’s a positive in google trying bing/image – that they’re not afraid to learn from competition What Amit is referring to is the … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 15 Comments

Embark Together

I would like to quickly follow up on my previous post on explicitly collaborative information seeking.  My claim in that post was that, despite the shared terminology, a service like Aardvark (or Twitter) is not truly collaborative. Let me be … Continue reading

Posted in Collaborative Information Seeking, Social Implications | 3 Comments

A Fragile Local Maximum for the Web

On Twitter today, Josh Young made an interesting observation to which I would like to call attention: Ya, @jerepick, with “fauxpen” attached, google’s “nav. search as the top of the stack” is a fragile local maximum for the web. This … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | Leave a comment

Google and the Meaning of Open

There is a fantastic Google blog post today by Jonathan Rosenberg on the meaning (and value) of openness.  Whooo-boy.. where do we start with this can of worms?  Guess I’ll jump right in.  Warning: This is probably the longest post … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 5 Comments

Loss Leaders versus Exploratory Search

Chris Dixon has a post yesterday about search and the social graph.  An interesting read, but what struck me the most was a tangent about how current search engines make money: Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 9 Comments

More Information Is Positive

Via Greg Linden, I came across this interesting quote from Eric Schmidt about the obligation to help newspapers succeed: Finally, Eric claimed Google has a moral duty to help newspapers succeed: Google sees itself as trying to make the world … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Social Implications | Leave a comment

Exploration, Collaboration, and Open Government

What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers?  What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection … Continue reading

Posted in Collaborative Information Seeking, Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | Leave a comment

Breadth Destroys Depth

A few days ago I posted a question about why modern web retrieval systems offer no explicit relevance feedback mechanisms.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the following attitude, explained by one of my favorite bloggers, Nick … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 2 Comments